I’d generally avoid CLAs when possible. They’re a pain for contributors, and it’s not clear that most projects actually need them.
Conversation
I agree that they're a pain, but I strongly disagree with avoiding them if you expect your project to have >10 contributors and exist for >10 years.
>10y or >10 contributors, and eventually you will *have* to change some aspect of it. It is *so much better* to have a CLA then.
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The LLVM relicensing comes to mind. That’s still ongoing and is tricky. Some think that’s a positive thing.
Biggest one for me would be changes in laws / application of laws. You can’t plan for those, and contributors literally die eventually so you’d need to replace their work
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How does that actually matter with sufficiently permissive licensing? The LLVM relicensing stuff does not look like anything normal ppl should see as desirable, and if it had been impossible the corporate overlords wouldn't have been able to waste folks' time on it...
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I don't know the whole story, but the original license was permissive and the new license is permissive but many pages long.
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Apache 2 isn't complicated. It's longer because it leaves much less unsaid and open to interpretation. The explicit patent grant from contributors is probably why companies like Google are so fond of it. It's cleaner than having a separate patent grant.
apache.org/licenses/LICEN
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I don't understand why they treated it as something so urgent to the point that code rewrites are needed for permissively licensed code.
AOSP mostly uses Apache 2 but happily imports a lot of BSD/MIT and other permissively licensed code. Why are LLVM's needs so different?
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It makes sense that they want explicit terms for patents, contributions and trademarks in the license. Open source community and also programmers more generally take many things for granted about copyright law, etc. Us agreeing upon how things work doesn't mean that a court will.
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For example, the outcome in Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc. was not a given and didn't settle whether APIs can be copyrighted. It was decided that Google's usage was fair use, but fair use is determined on a case-by-case basis and wouldn't apply if things were a bit different.
Nearly any programmer saw that case as totally ridiculous and any other outcome as untenable but that doesn't mean courts are on the same page. The Federal Circuit court wasn't on the same page. Same could happen with implied rules about submitting patches / pull requests, etc.
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